Did I hose my system?

[hippocampe]

I was on the net the other day and had my firewall disabled.

Suddenly, my system stopped responding (except the mouse which still moved). I tried to restart X using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace but it didnt work.

I tried the SysRq sequence and according to the disk light, it was working except that the last command (to reboot) didnt work. So I shut down using the power switch. At next power up, I had problems with an ext3 filesystem and fsck offered me to repair the error or to ignore it and I would repair it myself. It warned me about losing files if I chose to let it correct the error but It happened to me before and everything went fine so I said go for it. Except this time I was out of luck.

Everything was going normally up to the login screen.

The problem is I cant get into KDE or GNOME. I cant start any KDE program and some GNOME programs. If I choose KDE as the desktop, ksplash and kserv.....(something) crash and thats'all. If I'm lucky, I get the splash screen for a while and then X restarts.

I don't know wich part of the system is affected since I can use Fluxbox without problems. Only, I can't start the programs I usually use.

When I start a KDE prog from console it says something like: "cannot open ICE connection".

I'm wondering if there's a way to check the integrity of system files and have them refreshed if needed.

What's up with ext3 anyway? Isn't this what it's supposed to prevent? I never had any problems with XFS.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Cannonfodder]

I would start with this..

 

1. Boot off of CD1, hit F1, type rescue, do not load partitions, go to prompt. Do not CHROOT /mnt.

 

2. Mount your root partition (it may already be mounted). You can check by going cd /mnt and looking at what is there.

 

3. Type cat /etc/fstab and look at the mount entries. Check each one related to a partition and see if it is already mounted. If not, try mounting it. See if you can identify the trouble spot. If you only have one partition for the entire linux system than that shouldn't take so long.

 

4. If you identify a troubled partition, try doing repairs on it.

 

I personnally use reiserfs as its been extremely stable. Gets a lot of development work on it.

[hippocampe]

Well, I think I know which partition has the problem: hde6 which is the root partition of my install. That is the one that it proposed to repair after the lockup. Note that when I boot now, it says hde6 clean . I have separate partitions for /var, /usr and /home.

If I still have a corrupted partition, it should point it out at bootup right?

It appears that it has corrected the error and screwed up some files in the process.

You are suggesting that I run fsck on that partition?

Since I cant fsck a mounted partition I guess I'll need to boot from the CD to do this?

[Cannonfodder]

Correct...

 

and then either you are set or you are fscked..

 

If fscked then you need to backup important files (if possible) and then reinstall. Then implement a backup system so you can easily step back and recover when these things happen. Try checking out partimage as a partition backup tool or mondo.

[hippocampe]

Here is what it says when I start a KDE program from the console:

 

Loading required GL library /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2

IO error opening ICE Connection!

 

kdeinit: DCOPServer could not be started, aborting.

IO error opening ICE Connection!

[hippocampe]

I got it working. I'm not sure what happened though.

Wheew, when I think I almost reinstalled the OS 8)

I searched for that error message in google and it appears to be a problem with KDE only.

I ran a KDE program as root once and it worked after that.

I noticed at least a file which was changed (my xmms playlist) and contains strange characters in filenames.

The problem must have been in some KDE config files which were corrupt.

Now that it works, time for a backup!!!